Using the Seasonal Planner Chart to plan your year ahead

31 December 2019

As we head into the new year it’s an exciting time to schedule your desired events/races for next year and begin outlining how you will organise your training throughout the year to prepare. This is not just useful for self-coached athletes; coached athletes on the platform can still enter events into their calendar and start a discussion with their coach on how they will fit in. There are a range of tools available to visualise a full season of training and racing on Today’s Plan which we will run through step by step in this article. Most of them are located in the Seasonal Planner Chart (SPC) which is a chart that you can open or close at any time with one click from the calendar!

1. Enter your events

You first need to enter your desired events into your calendar. You can do this by going to the day in the future on the calendar, clicking the “+” button in the bottom right and clicking Add event. Then fill out the form with all the details for the event including the event priority (A,B or C).

2. Open the Seasonal Planner Chart (SPC)

On your calendar, click the small red arrow at the bottom to open the seasonal planner chart, you should see some of your events in there. To expand the number of weeks shown click the options button in the top right and increase the number of “weeks after today”. To see an entire year, change that value to 52.

3. Adjust viewing options (optional)

This is an optional step. Now is a good time to have a play around with some of the customisation options under the options button. Below are a few common ones:

View the other metrics e.g. TSB, Duration, Distance.

Adjust the TSB ranges for the CTL- this is useful if you have a different classification of a “hard” training week as you can make the red value more negative, e.g. only weeks ending at less than -12 TSB are coloured red.

You may also wish to adjust the CTL colouring e.g. instead of green, orange and red you could have light blue (easy week), medium blue (moderate week), dark blue (heavy week). This is just a way to add some personalisation, it won’t affect the data that is viewed. An example of that is shown below.

4. Add in training phases

Now that you’ve added your events and can see the year ahead, you (or your coach) can add in your desired training phases. These are called “plans” in the system, but they are just blocks of weeks highlighted in the SPC with a different colour. To add a new phase in, click and drag across the SPC for the specific weeks for that phase. Then name the phase, select your desired colour for the highlight, then press save. For this process you don’t need to add in any of the other details in this “Create Plan” modal. That’s it! Once you add in your training phases you will be able to see your full schedule for the year.

We hope you can use the tools above to plan your year ahead and use the plan as a source of motivation to keep you on track. If you are a coached athlete following the process above is also a good opportunity to have a discussion with your coach about your overall training plan and goals for the year. If you have any more questions on the SPC please contact our support team at support@todaysplan.com.au for assistance.